assassinate Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and were involved in planned coups

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1 The Weather Today Rain, high in the mid to Upper 60s. The chance of rain is 50 per cent. Saturday Partly cloudy, high in the upper 40s to mid 50s. Yesterday Noon Air Quality Index, 22; Temperature range Details B12. obingion 98th Year. No e 1975, The Weehinron Poet Ca, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1975 Lumumba, Castro By George Lardner Jr. weseiogion Post Malt wraite U.S, officials initiated plots to assassinate Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and were involved in planned coups that, resulted in the death of three other foreign leaders, the Senate intelligence committee reported yesterday. The committee said it was unable to determine whether any President explicitly ordered any assassination activity by the Central Intelligence Agency, but that there was a strong chain of evidence suggesting that "the plot to assassinate Lumumba was authorized by President Eisenhower." The 347-page report, made public after a rare secret session of the Senate, was more ambiguous about the plots against Castro under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, but charged that the chief executives clearly failed in their duties to prevent such "undesired activities from taking place." The three foreign leaders killed in coups or attempted coups with various degrees of U.S. backing were Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic who was murdered in 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam who was murdered in 1963, and Gen. Rene Schneider of Chile who was killed during a kidnaping attempt in Quoting President Kennedy, who once. reportedly said, "We can't get into that kind of thing or we would all be targets," the committee concluded by proposing legislation that would make it a crime to kill or to conspire to kill foreign officials outside the United States in peacetime. Made public despite the strenuous objections of President Ford and a reportedly intensive lobbying effort to suppress the document, the report emphasized that in no case did the CIA succeed in any of its death plots. "It shows above all that Americans are no good at all at killing, lying and covering up and I'm glad that's the case," Sen. Walter F, Mondale ill-minn.) declared at a committee press conference. It also showed schemes ranging from the ludicrous to the bizarre to the chilling. For example, the report disclosed that on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, a high-ranking CIA officer, Desmond Fitzgerald, was meeting with a secret Cuban agent known as AM-LASH in Paris to offer him a poison pen rigged with a hypodermic needle, and "recommending that he use Blackleaf-40, a deadly poison which is commercially available." A long-secret CIA Inspector General's report noted: "It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent... and giving hin an assassination device for use against Castro,"

2 .1-^r Index 4 Seething.4 Amusements C13 Metro B 1 Classified D 7. Obituaries B12 Comics C17 Religion B11 Editorials Al8 Sports D 1 Fed. Diary C17 Style C 1 Financial - B16 TV-Radio C12 Phone (202) Claasiflou Circulation Maher imam! MetrOnolltan arell Sec Box e 10 la Plots Told. The pen, in any case, was never used. A CIA case officer present at the meeting was quoted as remembering that AM- LASH, a high-ranking Cuban who enjoyed Castro's confidence, did not "think much of the device" and complained that the CIA could "come up with something more sophisticated than that," Other plans to assassinate Castro, the report said, involved the use of "poison cigars, exploding seashells and a contaminated diving suit," but these never got past the laboratory stage. A CIA-Mafia plot to kill the Cuban leader, however, went further and apparently involved the procuring of potential assassins within Cuba and the delivery of poison pills to the island. The ClAscheme against Lumumba, who. was murdered by other elements in Katanga Province Jan. 17, 1961, was concocted in 1960 and, the report stated, "quickly advanced to the point of sending poisons to the Congo to be used for the assassination." One Eisenhower White Rouse aide. Robert Johnson, was quoted in the report as having- understood the President "to have ordered Lumumba's assassination" at a National Security Council meeting Aug. 18, 1960, but the committee said there was an "ambiguity and lack of clarity" in the records that tended to contradict such evidence. Although rich in detail, the report See ASSASSINATE, AB, Col. 1

3 ASSASSLNATE, From Ai repeatedly expresses the committee's frustration over its inability after a long investigation that piled up almost 10,000 pages of testimony to draw firm con clusions about who authorized the assassination plots. Several committee members, however, made clear in supplementary statements that they thought it likely the schemes had the highest approval. Sen. Howard H. Baker IR-Tenn.) said it was his view "that on balance the likelihood that Presidents knew of assassination plots is greater than the likelihood that they did not." Sen. Robert B. Morgan ID-N.C.) said he bad been impressed during.the comrnittee's secret hearings "by the belief held by the principals thatthose illegal and immoral acts engaged in by our in-, telligence agencies were sanctioned by higher authority and even by the 'highest authority.' I am convinced by the large amount of circumstantial evidence that this is true.. " Yesterday's secret. Senate session, which lasted nearly four hours; ostensibly was called to discuss the findings. but instead the meeting was devoted almost entirely to the question of whether to suppress the report or let it be made public as the committee had voted to do. Sen. Walter Huddleston ID-liy.) said later he could not recall a single substantive question being put to committee members about the report itself. The issue of publication never came up for a Senate vote and the committee's decision stood. Senate intelligence rem- rnittee Chairman Frank Church ID-Idaho) and his colleagues were reportedly ad-. vised by Sen, Alan Cranston ID-Calif.) that the outcome might be a close vote that would not stand out as ringing support of.the report's public release. Both the Democrats and the Republicans on the 11-member Senate committee endorsed the report, The sole exception was Philip A. Hart ID-Mich.),iwbo said be thought it 'Might be. tnisleading" for him to sign it when illness had prevented him from attending -the hearings. However, the committee's ranking,. Republican, John G. Tower (Tex.), explicitly "disassociated" himself from the. public release of the report and, along with Sen. Barry Goldwater IR-Ariz.), pointedly lboycotted the committee press conference -.about its contents. For his part, Church was critical of CIA. Director William E. Colby's claims at a press conference Tuesday that publication of 12 names in the report might put these r individuals in danger.,i Church angrily denounced the ft suggestion as "absurd." Ticking off the. names of the 12 men Colby had in mind, Church said they included onetime FBI.. agent Robert Maheu, who previously held. a press conference to discuss his role; Henry Dearborn, former U.S. consul general to the Dominican Republic who! was "in close and continuous contact of with" the group killed Trujillo and who recently "identified himself in a letter to the editor of The Washington Post," and Lucien Conein, whose association with the South Vietnamese generals in the Diem coup was laid out in detail in the Pentagon Papers. Church emphasized the committee had deleted the names of some 20 other persons after what seemed legitimate arguments had been advanced, but he strongly defended the publication of the report as it was released yesterday. "This report," he said, "reaffirms our belief in our system of government. It belongs to the people and the people are entitled to know what went wrong and why." A major factor, the committee suggested, was the extreme, inherent ambiguity of the "executive command and control" system. "This creates the disturbing prospect that assassination activity might have been undertaken by officials of the United States government without its having been incontrovertibly clear that there was explicit authorizatidn from the President of the United States," the report noted. "At the same time," the committee added, "this ambiguity leaves open the possibility that there was a successfu 'plausible denial' and that a presidential authorization was issued but is now obscured." The senators also voiced special chagrin at the "circumlocutions" and "euphemisms" that turned up again and again in the course of the assassination inquiry. According to one footnote concerning an Iraqi colonel that the CIA considered disabling in 1960 by means of a handkerchief containing some sort of chemical, the CIA reported that the scheme was never carried out because thi colonel "suffered a terminal illness befort a firing squad in Baghdad Ian event all had nothing to do with) not very long after our handkerchief proposal was con, sidered."

4 Nixon Issued CIA Order to Block Allende U. S. Officials' Probers Can't Roles Detailed Trace Orders By Laurence Stern Washinglon Pom SIM WrliOr By Robert G. Kaiser Via-a1,4,9ton Pol Slatl lfirlini- President Nixon per The Senate intelhgence sonaily issued the order to committee had difficulty the Central Intelligence determining whether any Agency that initiated an American President intense political espionage authorized a plot to campaign against Chilean assassinate a foreign President Salvador leader. Allende in 1970, the Senate The committee concluded intelligepce committee that President Nixon did report disclosed yes ter-- explicitly instruct' the Central Intelligence Agency to day. prevent Salvador Allende The report also portrays from assuming power in Chile Kissinger. Secretary of former State Henry CIA in A. 1970, an assignment the CIA undertook and failed. Director Richard M. Helms The committee said the and other high-ranking U.S. available evidence permits "a officials as far more deeply reasonable inference that the implicated in the super-secret plot to assassinate (Congolese political warfare campaign Premier Patrice) Lumumba targeted at Chile's Socialist was authorized by President president than had been Eisenhower," but this was not known previously. certaie. The CIA plot to kill The report documented that- Lumifmtra also failed. the CIA station in Santiago Lumumba was killed by and U.S. military personnel Congolese acting on their own helped to plan and provide after, he was deposed, the weapons for the kidnaping of committee concluded. Chilean armed forces Com- The committee report said it mander-in-chief Rene was impossible to condude on Schneider, who had refused to the basis of the evidence it g0 along with CIA-supported uncovered that the incumbent plans for a coup to prevent President was directly in- Allende's election. Schneider volved in the assassination was murdered in a bungled plots against Fidel Castro,' kidnaping attempt in the early Gen. Rene Schneider of Chile, morning of Oct. 22, 1970, by a or Dominican dictator Rafael, group of military abductors. Trujillo. The reveleitions in the report In its attempts to pinpoint are in sharp conflict with prior responsibility for various public statements by former assassination plots, the President Nixon, Secretary committee repeatedly en- Kissinger and Helms, now countered bureaucratic ambassador to Iran. techniques that diffused or Nixon, in an interview in the disguised individual current issue of Ladies Home responsibility. The com- Journal, asserts, "We had mittee's report defines nothing to do with Chile or several of them: Allende. That was the "Plausible Denial." This Chileans." Kissinger had is a technique intended to stated in executive session insulate senior officials from during his confirmation the covert activities of their hearing Sept, 17, 1973, for the subordinates, so that senior Secretary of State post that i officials can deny knowledge "the CIA was... in a very of or responsibility for those minor way involved in the 1970 activities if they are election (in Chile)." discovered. To establish. Nixon on Sept. 15, 1975, "plausible deniability," the See CHILE, AS, Col. 5 See AUTHORITY, A7, Col. 1

5 CHILE. From AL "informed CIA Director Richard Helms that an Allende regime in Chile would not he acceptable to the United States," the report said. "The CIA was instructed. by President Nixon to play a direct role in organizing a military coup d'etat in Chile to prevent Allende's accession to the presidency." The CIA action was to be kept secret from the Depar- ' tments of State, Defense and the U.S. ambassador to Chile, as outlined by the President, the report said. In recalling the White House. meeting, which was attended by Kissinger and then.,attorney General John N. Mitchell, Helms testified it was his impression ". the President came down very hard that he wanted something done, and he didn't much care how and that he was prepared to make money available... "If I ever carried a marshal's baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day," Helms told the Senate committee. His handwritten notes from the session reflected these instructions and reactions from President Nixon: "One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile... not concerned risks involved. no involvement of Embassy.. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary... make the economy scream. 48 hours for plan of action." As the plan for the Chilean Intervention evolved, the report revealed, not even the Forty Committee, the White House panel that plans covert actions against foreign governments, was to be informed of the direct CIA involvement in a coup attempt. The agency's reporting "both for informational and approval purposes," was to he directly to Kissinger or his deputy, then Alexander M. Haig, according to the Senate investigators. One high-ranking CIA official deeply involved in the Chile operation, former Deputy Director for Plans Thomas Karamessines, testified that Kissinger, then serving as national security adviser, "left no doubt in my mind that he was under the By James K. W. Athsrhst Tho Washington Post Sen. Church holds up copy of committee report at press conference. heaviest of pressure to get this accomplished, and he in turn was placing us under the heaviest of pressures to get it accomplished." The deputy chief of the agency's Latin American division, who was unnamed in the report, told the committee that the pressure to block Allende's election was "as tough as I ever saw it in my time there, extreme." Allende's government was toppled by a military coup in which he died on Sept. 11, It was Schneider's death in October 197o, not his, which was the focus of' the committee's investigation. The report said that the granting of "carte blanche authority to the CIA by the Executive Lit this case may have contributed to the tragic and unintended death of General Schneider." The report describes how the CIA found Schneider, head of Chile's armed services, and former President Eduardo Frei unwilling to cooperate in a coup designed to forestall Allende's election. As a result the agency's operatives in Santiago began to contact Chilean military leaders who they felt would go along with a coup scheme. The main contact was retired Gen.. Roberto Viaux, a right-wing military leader who was convicted as the "intellectual author" of the Schneider kidnap attempt. The report said that guns were passed by the CIA in ' Santiago to a group of military conspirators who had bungled a kidnap attempt directed at Schneider on Oct. 19. The final attempted kidnaping and shooting of Schneider was carried out, however, by yet another group of conspirators. A major conflict of testimony developed between Kissinger and Haig, on one hand, and CIA witnesses, on the other, as to the White House role in the Chilean intervention. Kissinger's testimony, corroborated by Haig, was that the Nixon administration sought to close off CIA efforts to promote a military coup in Chile on Oct. 11 a week before Schneider was killed. The CIA officials testified that the White House was regularly briefed on the actions in Chile. Karamessines recalled that a White House meeting on Oct. 15 with Kissinger and Haig ended "on Dr. Kissinger's note that the Agency should continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot in sight now, after the 24th of October, after 5 November, and into the future until such time as new marching orders are given." Korry, in a message to former President Frei encouraging him to join American efforts to deny the election to Allende, wrote that "not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty, a policy designed for a long time to come to accelerate the hard features of a Communist society in Chile." On another occasion, in a situation report to Kissinger and Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Charles Meyer. Korry cabled that in order to bring about the return to power of Americanfavored Frei with Chilean military collusion "if necessary, General Schneider would have to be neutralized,

6 by displacement if necessary." What was described in the report as "the Frei gambit," strongly favored by Korry and the American mission, never came,about. Allende was replaced by a military junta which banned all political parties, including Frei's Christian Democratic Party. The report produced evidence to show that the Nixon Administration sought to goad the Chilean military into taking independent action which would pre-empt the 1970 election. On Oct. 7, Korry received a cable from Washington authorising him "to inform discreetly the Chilean military through the channels available to you that if a successful effort is made to block Allende from taking office, we would reconsider the cuts we have thus far been forced to make in Chilean MAP (military assistance program) and otherwise increase our presently programmed MAP for the Chilean Armed Forces... "If any steps the military should take should result in civil disorder, we would also be prepared promptly to deliver support and material that might be immediately required." The intervention attempts, were. managed from Washington along two tracks. Kissinger, in his testimony to the committee, sought to distinguish between them. The first anti-allende action undertaken by the Nixon administration was on March 25, 1970, when the Forty Committee approved a joint proposal of the embassy and the CIA for a "spoiling" operation against Allende. In Washington $135,000 was authorized for this program of "propaganda and other activities" designed to prevent an Allende electoral victory. Former U.S Ambassador to. Chile Edward Korry, another major figure in the intervention,- submitted jointly to the CIA and Department of State proposals which the report described as a contingency plan to make "a $500,000 effort in Congress ( the Chilean Congress) to persuade (sic) certain shifts in voting on 24 October 1970." That was the date when the Congress of Chile was finally to decide the presidential elections following a popular ballot in which no majority winner emerged. Allende led the Sept. 4 popular vote and 1 was subsequently declared the I winner by the Congress. "... There was work by all of the agencies to try to prevent Allende from being seated. and there was work by all of the agencies on the so-called (rack I to encourage the military to move against Allende," Kissinger told the committee, "The difference between the Sept. 15 meeting (discussing what became of Track 11) and a what was being done in a general within the governmerit was that President Nixon was encouraging a - more direct role for the CIA in actually organizing such a coup." be said. The terms Track I and Track II, the report revealed, were "known only to CIA and White House officials who were knowledgeable about the President's Sept. 15 order to the CIA." A canvass by the committee of former Secretary of State William P. Rogers, former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird and other top State and Defense department officials revealed that none of them was informed specifically of President Nixon's instructions to Helms which were carried. out under the Track II operation, the report said. Karamessines explained to the committee that the reason for the more secret Track II channel was that the State. Department might object if the CIA involvement with the Chilean military "were to be laid out at a Forty Committee meeting." The Forty Committee is one of the most secretive deliberative bodies. of the government... The only other thing I can contribute," added Karamessines, "is that it was ' felt that the security of the activity would be better protected if knowledge of it were limited."

7 AUTHORITY. From Al committee found, officials involved in the activities it investigated often resorted to: "Circumlocution and Euphemism." These techniques, the committee learned, can be used by senior officials to deliver instructions indirectly, or by subordinates to report indirectly on their activities. Generalized instructions. The committee said Presidents and other senior officials often gave vague orders like "keep Allende from assuming office" or "get rid of the Castro regime" - orders that could be interpreted in numerous ways. Moreover, the committee heard testimony from former presidential aides that if a President ever did directly order an assassination plot, his order could have been deliberately omitted from all written records. The system of executive command and control was so inherently ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what level assassination activity was known and authorized," the committee said. "This creates the disturbing prospect that assassination activity might have been undertaken by officials of the United States government without its having been incontrovertibly clear that there was explicit authorization from the President..." It is also possible, the committee said, that the ambiguity was deliberate. -and that a presidential authorization was issued but is now obscured." - The committee found extensive evidence of deliberately ambiguous or deliberately unrecorded communications within the government. For example, Michael Mulroney, "a senior CIA officer in the Directorate for Plans (which is in charge of covert activities)," told the committee of his refusal. to participate in the proposed assassination of Lumumba: "In the agency (CIA), since you don't have documents, you have to be awfully canny and you have to get things on record." Mulroney explained. Therefore, when he was asked to participate in the assassination of Lumumba, he said, he went to the office of Richard Helms, then chief of operations in CIA's clandestine services division, and said he would "under no conditions do it." On the question of President Eisenhower's involvement in the plot against Lumumba, the committee heard testimony from a senior While House official who was convinced Mr. Eisenhower had authorized the assassination plot at a meeting in the White House, though the official could not remember the President's precise words. Others who attended the same meeting did not share the same conviction, and minutes of the meeting did not show a direct instruction from Eisenhower to kill the Congolese premier. Nevertheless, Allen Dulles, then director of the CIA, and lower-ranking CIA officials involved in the plotting against Lumumba apparently believed they had clear presidential authorization for their behavior. According to the committee, the President definitely did express a strong interest in doing something to deal with Lumumba, whom the Eisenhower ad- Mmistrattun cuiwuereu a wuct man and a pawn of the Soviet Union. Only in the case of President Nixon and Chile did the committee find compelling evidence of direct presidential involvement, though in this case there was no direct talk of assassination, Helms produced handwritten notes of his meeting with Nixon on Sept. 15, 1970, at which, according to the notes, the President said: "One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!... $10,000,000 available, more if necessary..." The Senate committee concluded that in some cases, officials of the CIA withheld information about assassination plots from their superiors in the CIA and from other government officials. The committee report specifically criticized Helms and Richard Bissell, former CIA deputy director for plans. Helms withheld from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President Johnson information of plots against Castro, the committee found. He also withheld information about the CIA's use of underworld figures to try to kill Castro from his own boss. John McCone, when McCone became CIA director. This was "a grave error of judgment," the committee found, "and Helms' excuses 'provided in testimony to the committee) are unpersuasive." "On some occasions when Richard Bissell had the opportunity to inform his superiors about the assassination effort against Castro," the committee said, "he either failed to inform them, failed to do so clearly, or misled them." The Senate panel also learned that even when properly informed, officials of the executive branch were sometimes helpless to guide events. The report quotes an October, 1963, cable from William Bundy, then assistant secretary of state, to the American embassy in Saigon, responding to a message from the embassy to the effect that it could no longer halt a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem. "We cannot accept conclusion that we have no power to delay or discourage a coup," Bundy cabled,